Like Jennifer Wen Ma and Liu Chuang, Li Lang (b. 1961) is driven by a strong social conscience. He focuses his creative attention on those disadvantaged by the breakneck pace of China’s social changes; people separated from their own communities, socially isolated, or economically disadvantaged. Li’s projects lie between art and documentary research, exploring themes of the passing of time and the personal and cultural significance of memory. He often develops photographic ‘diaries’ to document the changing experiences of people and places through periods of time.
Following the death of his own father, Li was profoundly moved by the incongruity between the deep significance of personal and family experience of even the simplest lives of our loved ones, and the detachment and absence of detailed markers of life events in the spare annotations of dates of birth and death, kinship, or sentiment of grave markers. His series title Father’s 1927.12.03 – 2010.08.27 draws on those austere details from his father’s own gravestone. His simple images and overlaid pencil annotations of each date of the 30219 days of his father’s life reclaim each daily cycle of an apparently unremarkable life. Each composition is meticulously annotated with the series title and the individual work title. Li’s painful documentation of his father’s life is at once an expression of his own grief, and a construction of memories, markers of the cycles of life and death that transcend personal experience in their rich significance for his viewers.